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Author: Christina Ezrahi
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822978075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Classical ballet was perhaps the most visible symbol of aristocratic culture and its isolation from the rest of Russian society under the tsars. In the wake of the October Revolution, ballet, like all of the arts, fell under the auspices of the Soviet authorities. In light of these events, many feared that the imperial ballet troupes would be disbanded. Instead, the Soviets attempted to mold the former imperial ballet to suit their revolutionary cultural agenda and employ it to reeducate the masses. As Christina Ezrahi's groundbreaking study reveals, they were far from successful in this ambitious effort to gain complete control over art. Swans of the Kremlin offers a fascinating glimpse at the collision of art and politics during the volatile first fifty years of the Soviet period. Ezrahi shows how the producers and performers of Russia's two major troupes, the Mariinsky (later Kirov) and the Bolshoi, quietly but effectively resisted Soviet cultural hegemony during this period. Despite all controls put on them, they managed to maintain the classical forms and traditions of their rich artistic past and to further develop their art form. These aesthetic and professional standards proved to be the power behind the ballet's worldwide appeal. The troupes soon became the showpiece of Soviet cultural achievement, as they captivated Western audiences during the Cold War period. Based on her extensive research into official archives, and personal interviews with many of the artists and staff, Ezrahi presents the first-ever account of the inner workings of these famed ballet troupes during the Soviet era. She follows their struggles in the postrevolutionary period, their peak during the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, and concludes with their monumental productions staged to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in 1968.
Author: Christina Ezrahi
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822978075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Get Book Here
Book Description
Classical ballet was perhaps the most visible symbol of aristocratic culture and its isolation from the rest of Russian society under the tsars. In the wake of the October Revolution, ballet, like all of the arts, fell under the auspices of the Soviet authorities. In light of these events, many feared that the imperial ballet troupes would be disbanded. Instead, the Soviets attempted to mold the former imperial ballet to suit their revolutionary cultural agenda and employ it to reeducate the masses. As Christina Ezrahi's groundbreaking study reveals, they were far from successful in this ambitious effort to gain complete control over art. Swans of the Kremlin offers a fascinating glimpse at the collision of art and politics during the volatile first fifty years of the Soviet period. Ezrahi shows how the producers and performers of Russia's two major troupes, the Mariinsky (later Kirov) and the Bolshoi, quietly but effectively resisted Soviet cultural hegemony during this period. Despite all controls put on them, they managed to maintain the classical forms and traditions of their rich artistic past and to further develop their art form. These aesthetic and professional standards proved to be the power behind the ballet's worldwide appeal. The troupes soon became the showpiece of Soviet cultural achievement, as they captivated Western audiences during the Cold War period. Based on her extensive research into official archives, and personal interviews with many of the artists and staff, Ezrahi presents the first-ever account of the inner workings of these famed ballet troupes during the Soviet era. She follows their struggles in the postrevolutionary period, their peak during the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, and concludes with their monumental productions staged to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in 1968.
Author: Simon Morrison
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 0871408309
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
In this “incredibly rich” (New York Times) definitive history of the Bolshoi Ballet, visionary performances onstage compete with political machinations backstage. A critical triumph, Simon Morrison’s “sweeping and authoritative” (Guardian) work, Bolshoi Confidential, details the Bolshoi Ballet’s magnificent history from its earliest tumults to recent scandals. On January 17, 2013, a hooded assailant hurled acid into the face of the artistic director, making international headlines. A lead soloist, enraged by institutional power struggles, later confessed to masterminding the crime. Morrison gives the shocking violence context, describing the ballet as a crucible of art and politics beginning with the disreputable inception of the theater in 1776, through the era of imperial rule, the chaos of revolution, the oppressive Soviet years, and the Bolshoi’s recent $680 million renovation. With vibrant detail including “sex scandals, double-suicide pacts, bribery, arson, executions, prostitution rings, embezzlement, starving orphans, [and] dead cats in lieu of flowers” (New Republic), Morrison makes clear that the history of the Bolshoi Ballet mirrors that of Russia itself.
Author: Zoë Anderson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300154283
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Each chapter introduces a period of ballet history and provides an overview of innovations and advancement in the art form. In the individual entries that follow, Anderson includes essential facts about each ballet's themes, plot, composers, choreographers, dance style, and music. The author also addresses the circumstances of each ballet's creation and its effect in the theater, and she recounts anecdotes that illuminate performance history and reception.
Author: Cadra Peterson McDaniel
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739199315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere is the first full-length examination of a Soviet cultural diplomatic effort. Following the signing of an American-Soviet cultural exchange agreement in the late 1950s, Soviet officials resolved to utilize the Bolshoi Ballet’s planned 1959 American tour to awe audiences with Soviet choreographers’ great accomplishments and Soviet performers’ superb abilities. Relying on extensive research, Cadra Peterson McDaniel examines whether the objectives behind Soviet cultural exchange and the specific aims of the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1959 American tour provided evidence of a thaw in American-Soviet relations. Interwoven throughout this study is an examination of the Soviets’ competing efforts to create ballets encapsulating Communist ideas while simultaneously reinterpreting pre-revolutionary ballets so that these works were ideologically acceptable. McDaniel investigates the rationale behind the creation of the Bolshoi’s repertoire and the Soviet leadership’s objectives and interpretation of the tour’s success as well as American response to the tour. The repertoire included the four ballets, Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, Giselle, and The Stone Flower, and two Highlights Programs, which included excerpts from various pre- and post-revolutionary ballets, operas, and dance suites. How the Americans and the Soviets understood the Bolshoi’s success provides insight into how each side conceptualized the role of the arts in society and in political transformation. American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere demonstrates the ballet’s role in Soviet foreign policy, a shift to "artful warfare," and thus emphasizes the significance of studying cultural exchange as a key aspect of Soviet foreign policy and analyzes the continued importance of the arts in twenty-first century Russian politics.
Author: Philip Gleissner
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487543891
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
Together with a new political, social, and cultural order, the Bolshevik Revolution also brought about a spatial revolution. Changed patterns, motivations, and impacts of migration collided with new cultural forms and aesthetic mandates. Red Migrations highlights the various multidirectional and multilateral transnational movements of leftist thinkers, artists, and writers. The book draws on avant-garde poets such as David Burliuk, Marxist theoreticians such as János Mácza, and “fellow travellers” such as Langston Hughes, revealing how leftists of all stripes were inspired and at times impelled by the Soviet Revolution to cross borders. It explores how the resulting circulation of ideas, aesthetic forms, and individuals not only contributed enormously to the ferment of creative activity in the early Soviet years, but also deeply informed international leftist aesthetics and political practice throughout the twentieth century. The robust and diverse transnational networks created by these circulations are at the centre of this volume. With original archival research and insightful analyses, Red Migrations sheds light on the ideals, aspirations, and disappointments of leftist transnationalism from the 1920s through the 1960s and the aesthetic forms they engendered.
Author: Janice Ross
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300207638
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 536
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Book Description
Everyone has heard of George Balanchine. Few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine's contemporary, who remained in Lenin's Russia and survived censorship during the darkest days of Stalin. Like Shostakovich, Yakobson suffered for his art and yet managed to create a singular body of revolutionary dances that spoke to the Soviet condition. His work was often considered so culturally explosive that it was described as like a bomb going off.” Based on untapped archival collections of photographs, films, and writings about Yakobson's work in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets, as well as interviews with former dancers, family, and audience members, this illuminating and beautifully written biography brings to life a hidden history of artistic resistance in the USSR through this brave artist, who struggled against officially sanctioned anti-Semitism while offering a vista of hope.
Author: Mayhill C. Fowler
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487501536
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Cover -- Copyright page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Note to the Reader on Transliteration -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: The Beau Monde on the Borderlands -- 1 The Russian Imperial Southwest: Theatre in the Age of Modernism and Pogroms -- 2 The Literary Fair: Mikhail Bulgakov and Mykola Kulish -- 3 Comedy Soviet and Ukrainian? Il'f-Petrov and Ostap Vyshnia -- 4 The Official Artist: Solomon Mikhoels and Les' Kurbas -- 5 The Arts Official: Andrii Khvylia, Vsevolod Balyts'kyi, and the Kremlin -- 6 The Soviet Beau Monde: The Gulag and Kremlin Cabaret -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index
Author: Anne Searcy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190945125
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
In 1959, the Bolshoi Ballet arrived in New York for its first ever performances in the United States. The tour was part of the Soviet-American cultural exchange, arranged by the governments of the US and USSR as part of their Cold War strategies. This book explores the first tours of the exchange, by the Bolshoi in 1959 and 1962, by American Ballet Theatre in 1960, and by New York City Ballet in 1962. The tours opened up space for genuine appreciation of foreign ballet. American fans lined up overnight to buy tickets to the Bolshoi, and Soviet audiences packed massive theaters to see American companies. Political leaders, including Khrushchev and Kennedy, met with the dancers. The audience reaction, screaming and crying, was overwhelming. But the tours also began a series of deep misunderstandings. American and Soviet audiences did not view ballet in the same way. Each group experienced the other's ballet through the lens of their own aesthetics. Americans loved Soviet dancers but believed that Soviet ballets were old-fashioned and vulgar. Soviet audiences and critics likewise appreciated American technique and innovation but saw American choreography as empty and dry. Drawing on both Russian- and English-language archival sources, this book demonstrates that the separation between Soviet and American ballet lies less in how the ballets look and sound, and more in the ways that Soviet and American viewers were trained to see and hear. It suggests new ways to understand both Cold War cultural diplomacy and twentieth-century ballet.
Author: Joel Lobenthal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190253703
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Alla Osipenko is the gripping story of one of history's greatest ballerinas, a courageous rebel who paid the price for speaking truth to the Soviet state. A cast of characters drawn from all sectors of Soviet and post-Perestroika society makes this biography as encyclopedic and encompassing as a great Russian novel.
Author: Gleb Tsipursky
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Most narratives depict Soviet Cold War cultural activities and youth groups as drab and dreary, militant and politicized. In this study Gleb Tsipursky challenges these stereotypes in a revealing portrayal of Soviet youth and state-sponsored popular culture. The primary local venues for Soviet culture were the tens of thousands of clubs where young people found entertainment, leisure, social life, and romance. Here sports, dance, film, theater, music, lectures, and political meetings became vehicles to disseminate a socialist version of modernity. The Soviet way of life was dutifully presented and perceived as the most progressive and advanced, in an attempt to stave off Western influences. In effect, socialist fun became very serious business. As Tsipursky shows, however, Western culture did infiltrate these activities, particularly at local levels, where participants and organizers deceptively cloaked their offerings to appeal to their own audiences. Thus, Soviet modernity evolved as a complex and multivalent ideological device. Tsipursky provides a fresh and original examination of the Kremlin's paramount effort to shape young lives, consumption, popular culture, and to build an emotional community—all against the backdrop of Cold War struggles to win hearts and minds both at home and abroad.
